GOP Economic Terrorism Destroys the Safety Net of 38 Americans Every Minute

Thirty-eight Americans a minute. That's how many people have been losing their unemployment benefits since June 2. Every minute.

Rounded off, 55,000 a day. For 41 days. That's 2.25 million Americans who have lost the ability to keep a roof over their heads, buy food, keep the electricity on, pay health premiums. They wouldn't be at so great a risk if most Senate Republicans, Sen. Ben Nelson and the damned filibuster rule weren't standing in the way of extending their benefits. And those couple of million may soon have another million for company. If Harry Reid can't twist Ben Nelson's or Gov. Joe Manchin's arm hard enough - or figure out how to get another Republican to join Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins in voting for the extension - an additional 1.1 million people will see an end to their benefits by the end of July.

These aren't Americans who lost their jobs in the past few months and are still making do from savings, credit cards and parental assistance. They're the long-term unemployed – some of the 6.8 million Americans without work for 27 weeks or longer. Most of them, 4.7 million, have been jobless for more than a year. If you've been following the details of our ongoing jobless disaster, you know that both those official figures are post-Depression records. Almost certainly an undercount.

No six degrees of separation comes between them and us. Who doesn't know somebody – or somebody who knows somebody – caught in the grinder of long-term joblessness? A typical case: the guy laid off at 55 and unable to find another job to cover the routine costs of survival, much less provide care for an aging parent and keep a kid or two in college.

Foes of extending unemployment benefits keep spouting two excuses. First, benefits create hobos, layabouts who enjoy spending every day watching cable, drinking six-packs of brew and luxuriating on an average $315 a week instead of looking for a job. For a three-person family, that comes in at $16,380 a year, a couple of grand below the poverty line. Cushy, eh? The second excuse, which we've been barraged with for weeks, is that America cannot afford another extension because of the federal deficit. Between now and November, the extension would cost $33 billion.

These excuses are mere cover for what Republicans who have blocked the extension really want – to make life hard as possible until November. This, they believe, despite their disgraceful record at holding out-of-work Americans hostage to their ideology, will somehow give them cachet to trash the Democrats. And for what? For failing to achieve economically what Republicans have done everything in their power to keep them from achieving. They take their leader Rush Limbaugh seriously.

Paul Krugman describes them as the coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused. Right on the first count. But unconvincing on the second two. The heartless are neither clueless nor confused. They have a clear-headed agenda: economic terrorism. They're the real-life version of Saw. And their shameless goal is straightforward: worsen the economic situation for millions of Americans' in hopes of scoring more seats in Congress so they can cause even more damage to people's lives.

If they really wanted to ensure that extended benefits be paid for without increasing the deficit, they could easily accomplish it. For instance, every nickel of the extension could be recaptured if a Big Oil tax loophole bill, S. 4213 had passed. Or they could have chosen not to approve another $37 billion in supplemental war spending. Moreover, the cost of the extension is not so much as it first appears. As Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, pointed out last week on CNN, "the government recovers at least half of the [unemployment benefits] invested this way through higher revenue and taxes."